Finally I got an email – a long, unparagraphed, associative wail of dismay of which I've kept a copy: "For the life of me, I don't know who is going to fall in love with this novel. Xan Brooks gives his verdict on We Need to Talk About Kevin, while assorted bloggers, buyers and blaggers share their thoughts .uk But the responses you have to ask for you don't want." Finger-drumming, I wrote presciently to myself: "Should this day, too, pass, with no comment from NY, I have vowed to break my silence and press her for a response. (Indeed, the week the twin towers fell, New York Times columnist Frank Rich listed Columbine among a catalogue of national issues from "before" that suddenly didn't matter.) Ominously, my usually responsive agent went silent for weeks. Waiting for her response, I recorded in my journal that my new novel "abruptly seems irrelevant and, more dangerously, dated". I submitted the final draft to my New York literary agent right after 9/11, in that hilarious little window when everyone thought Americans would never read or watch anything violent again. Rife with difficult characters and climaxing in a high-school massacre of the sort Americans are rightly ashamed of, Kevin was a poor commercial bet from the get-go. The novel breaks one of the last taboos (and how amazing that at such a late date I found a taboo still standing): a mother disliking her son. Kevin is a dark book, and many of those initial rejections objected that its narrator, Eva, is "unattractive": a woman uneasy about pregnancy, who feels alarmingly blank after childbirth, and fails to form the bond with her boy that we like to imagine is as instinctive as closing the epiglottis when we swallow. The premiere of Lynne Ramsay's film of We Need To Talk About Kevin at the Cannes film festival provides an apt juncture at which to celebrate the miraculous power not of film but of fiction.
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